Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

> While what you're saying has a truthful ring to it, I fundamentally disagree with your hypothesis. The theory behind insurance is that everyone pays a flat rate so that there is enough money in the pool to cover statistically rare events. It works for fire, flood, life insurance, anything really. And the great thing about it is that the premiums are generally substantially lower than people expect. There's enough room there to charge enough for insurance companies to make a profit and still have affordable premiums.

The point is that you amortise your risk. You pay small affordable amounts because that's more reliable than a small chance of having to pay extraordinary amounts.

The point is not that everyone pays the same rate, or that people pay what they can afford. If that's what you want, you introduce a tax and a government program: government healthcare, government fire insurance, government flood insurance, etc. Most places effectively have this at the edges: any large scale event there will be significant government assistance, and insurance ends up only having to cover small incidents.

Fire insurance should be more expensive in Queensland than in Oslo. Flood insurance should be more expensive in New Orleans than in Qatar. Insurance is amortisation of risk, not a wealth redistribution service.

>This has gone haywire in recent decades due to corruption. In their never-ending quest for more profit, insurance company lobbyists have bribed politicians to change the laws so that they can create new brackets. Now car insurance costs more for young drivers. Now people in the south find they have no flood insurance or that their coverage wasn't good enough to replace their home or that there is so much red tape that they have to sue their own insurance company to get paid. Or the company simply doesn't pay, and the US government has to bail everyone out.

What are you even talking about? You don't need a law change to be 'allowed' to make premiums higher for younger drivers or people with houses that are prone to flooding. The default situation is that you can provide insurance to people at whatever price you feel like giving them, based on whatever factors you have calculated affect their risk. It's a free market.

If you live in an area that's basically guaranteed to flood in the next 10 years, of course you're going to have difficulty getting flooding insurance! They're basically guaranteed to lose money unless you're paying 20% of the value of your house in premiums every year.

I suspect you literally don't understand the concept of risk.

>The fact that smoking is the single biggest discriminator in insurance premiums after age is a huge red flag that corruption is afoot. Here are a few things statistically more dangerous than smoking:

How do you measure whether someone texts while driving? How do you measure whether someone gets enough exercise or has a healthy diet?

What do you even mean by 'corruption' anyway? This is how insurance works everywhere, in every country, every jurisdiction, universally. It's how insurance works as a very basic concept. The entire point is that you pay based on risk, and higher risk = higher premiums.

Working in a blue collar job already is factored into health insurance premiums. Go ask employers what their insurance premiums are for their employees in the United States. Obviously places with significantly dangerous jobs will have expensive health insurance premiums because that just makes logical sense for the health insurers.

>Corruption just shifts costs onto the poor in the name of efficiency.

It literally makes no logical sense for this to happen. Insurance is a very competitive market. If they are overcharging people relative to their actual risk, then someone that can measure that risk more accurately and charge you less while still making a reliable profit should exist.

And in fact that is exactly what happens.

I can't argue with any of your points specifically, in fact I agree with most of them.

I wonder if what's happening in the US though is that nearly all markets with inelastic demand curves have come to be dominated by a handful of companies (duopolies). So if I need an operation that I simply must have, or health insurance or internet service, I have a couple of companies to choose from that both charge roughly the same price, which is usually quite a bit more than what I'd like to pay.

The principle here is that markets with inelastic demand curves form natural monopolies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

But in the US, there has been no move to break up monopolies or transfer them into the public sector as utilities (like for water and electricity) since the Reagan era:

https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/97...

So the controversy you see in the media here about whether to have single payer healthcare, for example, stems from the fact that these natural monopolies are run by private sector corporations which have formed rackets within the government through the use of lobbying (a form of bribery). Their disinformation and smear campaigns across the major media outlets (themselves usually duopolies like CNN and Fox News) distract the populace so that basic economic principles take a back seat to political ideology. This keeps everyone divided in order to maintain the status quo of duopoly protection.

If the US were to move to public healthcare, the price would fall to a rate base (a legally determined profit margin above base cost) which must be determined through regulation since the free market can't find a fair price between supplier and consumer since the price is inelastic and/or there as an information or power imbalance which makes it a non-free market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_base_(utility)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_ratemaking

Looking to other countries as examples, this would lower the price to roughly 1/2 to 1/3 what it is now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

All of this is why when I see smoking singled out on health insurance applications, I tend to see corruption rather than market efficiency. Which is outrageous, because my vote would be to move health insurance into the public sector anyway. It feels like being kicked when I'm down.

I think what might be going on here is that you're thinking microeconomics while I'm thinking macroeconomics, but we can both be right.